Matt Kibbe: Abolish the IRS, implement a flat tax

During an appearance on Fox News Channel, Matt Kibbe, President and CEO of FreedomWorks, said that it’s time for the IRS to go, in the wake of the agency’s targeting of Tea Party and conservative groups.

When asked about the biggest problem with the IRS, the agency itself or the tax code, Kibbe explained “probably both,” noting that it’s “kind of a ‘chicken and egg’ situation.”

“I think all of these discretionary social engineering provisions in the IRS code has created an incredibly corrupt culture at the IRS,” said Kibbe. “But I do think that we need to acknowledge that the behavior at the IRS, which was institution-wide, it wasn’t a few bad apples, it was everybody exploiting that discretionary authority they have, choosing winners and losers, driving their personal political agendas.”

That’s enough so say we gotta pull it out by the roots’and replace it with a new revenue collection agency that implements the simpler tax provisions under a flat tax,” added Kibbe.

Steve Moore, who also appeared on the segment, noted that there are more IRS agents than border patrol agents, which he found ironic. Moore agreed with Kibbe that the IRS needed to be dissolved and backed the flat tax, though he conceded that this isn’t likely to happen soon. Kibbe agreed and added that it’s going to take a push from the outside to change the system.

“I think you’re in the middle of a paradigm shift in Washington, DC. We do have principled legislators like [Texas Senator] Ted Cruz that are willing to do it. We’re literally re-populating Washington,” he explained. “But I think when it comes to this cozy relationship between the IRS and all of these politicians that want to use the handouts in the tax code, we gotta do this from the outside. I think, literally, the American people are the only people that can get this done. It’s not gonna happen from inside the Beltway.”

Kibbe added that Americans, through the power of Internet, can bring a sorely lacking accountability to elected officials to change the system.